About Rod Holmes

Rod is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full-service Internet marketing company in Chicago. His main responsibility around the office is being the head PPC wrangler (he's a certified Google AdWords expert). He also seems to spend a lot of time on the phone talking with clients and prospective clients.
You can find Rod on several social media channels:
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12 Responses to Open Source Negative Keyword List

Missy, good question! It depends on what part of the buying funnel you are targeting. (More info on PPC and buying funnels here.) If you only targeting people who are ready to buy widgets, you wouldn’t want your ads to show up for someone who is searching for “blog about blue widgets” because that person is not ready to buy a widget. Many of the keywords you’ll find in the General tab are intended to make you think about what your goals are. Which part of the buying funnel you are targeting is very important in deciding which negative keywords are going to do you the most good.

Very useful, thank you for your work on this.
However, I am always thinking on those lists – maybe it is too overzealous to cut all the information seekers like those who search blog or newsletter in case of B2B tech? See, for example, we have B2B products with sales cycle of 6 month or so. naturally, someone who arrives at the first stages of sales funnel also are interesting… so, this question is painful

Hello Rolands, Two points related to your comment: 1) This list is intended to be used as a starting point. Every time we use the list, we go through it word by word and remove anything that does not fit the goals of campaign. 2) The list does emphasize removing keywords that indicate people are high up in the buying funnel. Again, use the list to help you make decisions—it forces you to think about if you want to target people who are looking for “info” or not.

I’d recommend having a tab with just state abbreviations (ny, nj, ca, etc) – often for local businesses, even with location targeting and everything set, I still end up with nonsense phrase matches that involve state abbreviations.

[...] you are just launching a new PPC campaign, you should consider this list of negative keywords. This comprehensive list, organized by category, is a good starting point for eliminating common [...]

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